Miscommunication Leads to Lost Funds
Money makes the world go around, this is especially relevant to the world of high school clubs. They get funds through fundraising or gracious donations (that are hard to come by if you’re a smaller club). Money is also intertwined with communication. Meaning, if you do a sloppy job communicating what you need, you’re bound to lose money since miscommunication can lead to mistakes, ultimately resulting in a loss of funds.
I can attest to this because during my senior year of high school, I was the vice president of my school’s robotics club and this was our team’s second year participating in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). For some context, the FRC is an international robotics competition where teams have a 6-week build period to create a robot that can do objectives in a game arena, keep in mind the max weight of these robots are 125 pounds so they are nothing to mess with. We were teeming with excitement after we had completed planning our robot design in the meeting a week before. The president, Alex, researched a few online shops to buy from and he discovered a site that provided free shipping to orders that totaled more than seventy-five dollars. Shipping for robotics parts is expensive so he decided to jump on this and tell everyone that we’ll order parts like motors, gears, wheels, aluminum churros, and gearboxes ASAP because we were on a tight schedule in our build period. Unfortunately, both Alex and I had to attend a rehearsal for a school event in the coming weeks after school, meaning we couldn’t be there to purchase the parts. This meant we couldn’t look over what the rest of the members were going to purchase with the club funds. To remedy this, I asked a few of our group members to order what we needed from the site that had the promotion, but we forgot one key detail when communicating this over Slack. We didn’t make it clear how to be eligible for free shipping, as all of the parts had to be put into one single order.
This ultimately leads to my teammates purchasing things one or two at a time thinking that since we are using the same account to get the parts, the site would automatically put free shipping for all the purchased items. This didn’t work, as it was our fault for not communicating clearly how to receive the promotion. We figured out this error in communication cost us around a hundred or more alone, which could’ve been prevented in the first place. To add salt to the wound, we couldn’t return the parts since we desperately needed them to start on the robot.
In this situation, I should’ve sent a more clear and concise message in Slack to get the point across. This would’ve saved us a few hundred dollars, headaches, and overall stress from the competition. In the end, COVID-19 canceled the competition, so it didn’t matter at all, but it was a good lesson in communicating effectively.
